Bitcoin Millionaires Are Coming for Streetwear
19-year-old Erik Finman is about to be the subject of a new CNBC documentary chronicling the lives of Bitcoin millionaires. This, he tells me, is what viewers can expect to see: “I wake up and I'm just in my blanket made of hundred [dollar bills] and I get up and they fall off my face and I jump into my Yeezys as soon as I get off the bed and brush my teeth with a Supreme toothbrush. It's just a day in the life, so if it so happens to be flexing in that day in the life, then what a coincidence,” he says with an immense amount of swagger. Finman says he’s only kidding about blanketing himself in hundred dollar bills (not that he hasn’tdoneit—that’s, like, first day millionaire stuff) and the ‘Preme toothbrush (not that one hasn’t come out of the brand’s mad science lab of accessories), but it wouldn’t be too far removed from reality. As Bitcoin booms, cryptocurrency and streetwear are intersecting in horrifying, hilarious, and circular ways: kids are learning how to invest by picking up streetwear, buying into crypto, accumulating riches, blowing said riches to flex in rare streetwear, and going on spending sprees. And in the process, they're encouraging more retailers to accept the currency.
Finman says he started investing in Bitcoin—the emerging currency that seems to be minting a new millionaire every day—when he was 12, and claims he had enough to sell off $100,000 worth of it by the time he was 15. A few years after that, at 17, he got into streetwear. (Some time after the release of Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, is where he places it.) In the roughly 18 months since then, Finman’s stockpiled streetwear at the rate of an A-list rapper. “Probably too much to say,” he says when I ask him to estimate the value of his collection. “I don't want to, I’d feel awful. Definitely the tens of thousands of dollars.” He bought the Kanye-designed Yeezy 750s first, before snapping up Adidas Stan Smiths, Yeezy 350s, and some “silly Bape stuff,” he says, before inevitably spiraling into Supreme. He stopped himself short of buying the Louis Vuitton and Supreme collaborative bags. “It's not out of my price range—that's not the problem,” he says. “It's more like, it's become an addiction—this is what alcohol is to some people.” Prices don’t seem to worry Finman. “I think I'm going to get the Red Octobers. I've been super busy. I've been doing a lot of crypto stuff recently but I do need to get back into it,” he says. “They're outrageously expensive. But,” he laughs, “I feel like, why not? If you can, why not splurge a little?”
Finman’s copping spree is fueled by his own love for clothes, but he also acknowledges that he buys to keep up with his contemporaries in the crypto community. “The new crypto money is getting into all the streetwear stuff and the Lamborghinis,” Finman says. He believes cryptocurrency has the power to completely upend financial institutions, but before that happens, he’s going to use the coin to cop some really rare garms. And he’s not alone: Finman is just one of the newly minted crypto millionaires who are looking for any way to flash their new digital riches. A lot of this spending is happening around streetwear, which crypto millionaires are buying into to show off their wealth. “They're like nerdy rappers,” Finman says of his peers. “Just the way that people flex in the crypto community, [streetwear’s] become a huge status symbol in the new crypto rich.” And retailers are popping up into the void to attract these big spenders.
The list of apparel retailers that accept cryptocurrency so far is short, but the ones that have started accepting Bitcoin and the like are particularly bullish on the technology powering it, blockchain. (Let’s get this out of the way: Blockchain cuts out middlemen like banks or Venmo-type apps, allows parties to trade directly, and keeps a running list of all those transactions.) Retailers are as gung-ho about the technology behind Bitcoin as any cryptobro on Twitter, and these aren’t just random stores investing in Bitcoin—huge players like Overstock.com have also enthusiastically gotten into the mix. “We think (with no hyperbole) that blockchain technology will have a greater impact on society than the internet has had once the full potential of the technology is realized,” says Jonathan Johnson, the president of Overstock's blockchain-investing arm Medici Ventures, tells me over email. Overstock started accepting Bitcoin in late 2013, but Johnson says only 0.25 percent of the site's revenue comes from Bitcoin purchases, mostly on bedding and home decor. For now, shoppers using Bitcoin are going elsewhere to find clothing that will impress their peers.
The ecommerce shop Finman frequents when he wants to drop crypto on clothes is Fancy, which started accepting the currency all the way back in 2013. A spokesperson for the shop tells me only that the platform’s “sold some amazing stuff via crypto.” But not wanting to talk about bitcoin is extremely rare in the world of bitcoin: other merchants are far more eager to talk about the currency.
For Jack Apkarian, who owns Jeffersons Apparel in Bergenfield, New Jersey, cryptocurrency is a way to grease the wheels for new cashless customers—and it’s a way to stockpile his own cache of coins. Apkarian says that he gets about 10 to 20 Bitcoin orders a month, or 1 to 6 percent of overall orders, and doesn’t bother to transfer it over to dollars. “I'm not necessarily interested in cashing it out,” he says. “It's an investment. It's worth a lot more than it was,” Apkarian says. Johnny Szeto, a co-partner at Kicx Unlimited, which also takes cryptocurrency, tells me, “We think it's going to be the thing of the future.” Plus, it helps crypto's cause when stores accept it and customers use it. "Any utility or use case for crypto helps to legitimize and mainstream it," says Charlie Shrem, a founding board member of the Bitcoin Foundation. Finman says buying clothing particularly helps. "A cool shoe company will hold a lot more weight for getting Bitcoin out there than a convenience store down the street," he explains. So the same is true in Bitcoin as in fashion: it helps to be cool.
Retailers like Jeffersons and Kicx Unlimited appear to have tapped into a strange overlap between the worlds of cryptocurrency and streetwear. The best going theory is that the twin booms—and the large number of young men who seem to be interested in both—is fueled by a lack of faith in traditional established systems: luxury conglomerates for streetwear and banks for crypto. But the actual reason for the crossover might be a lot less abstract. “I'm on the internet all the time, searching around for stuff and always trying to look for the new thing, and I feel like that's what a lot of streetwear culture is: trying to be up on the newest trends or know what's going on,” says Landau Lang, who runs the investment company Gold Linx Capital while operating a streetwear and sneaker YouTube channel on the side. “I think crypto is synonymous with that.” Lang also notes that kids who are able to grab hyped Supreme and “eight or nine pairs of Yeezys at every drop” are already tech-savvy and not afraid of testing out new currencies like Bitcoin.
And then consider that a sizable chunk of people buying rare streetwear and sneakers are doing so precisely to flip them back onto the market and make a profit—a process not that far removed from the way people trade cryptocurrency. “A lot of these people are picking up from a very early age how to identify great investments, and I think that carries over to the financial market,” Lang says.
Last month, Lang tweeted that he was selling a bunch of Supreme, Palace, Off-White, and sneakers, and offered to take half of the cash value if anyone was willing to pay with cryptocurrency. He tells me that he purposefully made the offer while crypto’s value was tanking, Litecoin in particular went from $339.45 at its peak to $130.48. “Most of it was to prove a point,” he says. “That's how much more optimistic I am in crypto.” Lang ended up selling a Supreme shirt for .65 of a Litecoin, worth $75 at the time. Since then, Litecoin’s rebounded to about $208 per coin, meaning that .65 Lang sold his Supreme shirt for is now worth roughly $135. His investment almost doubled in value—a good trade by any measure.
